Old Words Worth Eating, Not Reading

Once again I am having to eat my words. These words are 2 years old. But God remembered me writing them in a year end ministry letter, and he used a book entitled Friendship at the Margins by Christopher L. Heuertz and Christine D. Pohl to teach me.


Heuertz and Pohl show how friendship is a real Christian vocation that can bring reconciliation and healing to our broken world. They contend that unlikely friendships are at the center of an alternative plan for mission, where people are not objectified as potential converts but reached through a relationship of mutual giving and receiving.


I have seen that up close and personal here in the hotel. But I hit a pitfall. Heuertz and his ministry, Word Made Flesh, did not fall into that trap. He wrote that a challenge to "faithfulness and friendship emerged" when people wanted us to publish success stories. They resisted. "These were friends, beloved friends. Some still in the throws of working things out in their lives." (p. 37)


I didn't completely resist. Here is what I said two years ago in that letter. "The opportunity to privately pray for or to pray with individuals as we cross their paths and learn of their lives has been a privilege. We have encountered the unchurched and children, struggling believers and non-believers, gays and grandmothers, verbal abusers and controllers, college students and tourists, mothers and fathers, Wicken members and singles, as well as, drug dealers and exotic dancers."


Why didn't I resist? I remember having some wisdom to not give specifics, but why did I have to negatively characterize my fellow hotel dwellers? Some were strangers, others acquaintances. But some were friends. Friends, I still pray for today because I care for them.


Why did I have to point out their shortcomings when I have my own? All for the sake of trying to prove we were doing a good job here in the land of ministry that is why. I was wrong. I judged myself better than them and even put myself on a pedestal. That too was WRONG!


Lord, thank you for continually teaching me.